


A Few Great Operations

by halotolerant



Category: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Edwardian, Alternate Universe - Historical, Edwardian Period, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pneumonia, Sharing a Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:02:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5460701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex gave a short laugh and smiled. “I say, I’m sorry for how I spoke earlier. I’m in a foul mood. It’s just so stifling here.”</p><p>Peter inclined his head in acknowledgement. “What you need, my lad,” he said, for all the world as if he wasn’t the junior by nearly two years, “is the wide open spaces.”</p><p>“If this is more about emigrating to Canada,” Alex began, one hand raised in warning. </p><p>“How about darkest Devon?” </p><p>“Devon?” Alex blinked at him. “That’s very specific.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Few Great Operations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mikeneko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikeneko/gifts).



> Thank you to my beta <3 
> 
> \- - -
> 
>  _The labours of the field in winter are confined to a few great operations_ \- Henry Stephens, 'The Book of The Farm', 1844

“What ever possessed me to think that it would be better to stay in London for August?”

 

Alex pushed up another of the sash windows and sighed, body leaning into what little breeze now entered the room. “There’s no air left in the place, a person can’t breathe.”

 

“Can’t breathe so well in London in winter either, all that fog,” Peter argued cheerfully from his position in an armchair, and turned over a page in his book without looking up. “And you’re here because you said you’d commit murder with malice aforethought if you had to spend time at Heathlands being polite to all your aunt’s guests, and then rather than just lie like any sensible person you thought you’d actually volunteer yourself at your bank and then tell your aunt you were indispensable here in town.”

 

“Tell you what,” Alex muttered, ‘next question: why are you still here then? Taking up all my oxygen.”

 

Peter shrugged absently, eyes still on his book. Across his face, though, there crawled a fond smile that was, at that moment, entirely infuriating.

 

With the loudest sigh he could manage, Alex slumped down into the armchair opposite the one where Peter sat so calmly. The chair creaked in a companionable way in response. It had been with him since first he’d gone to Oxford, and not been new then, and he’d taken it on to the first place he’d lived when he’d come to London to start work at Stebbings & Stebbings merchant bank. When Peter had graduated a year later they’d decided to move into these shared digs on the first floor of a terraced house near Great Portland Street, and although Alex’s chair was a hideous lump next to the newly turned piece of luxury leather Peter had purchased for his own use, Peter himself had pleaded for its survival.

 

“The thing is, I want our living room to be as much like your study in college as possible,” Peter had said. “That was always my favourite place to be when I was there, after all.”

 

“Just so you could steal my tea and my oranges,” Alex had retorted, but with a smile of relief. He’d wondered, in the year apart, if Peter would think twice of still associating so much with him once they were outside the nursery of Oxford, in the real world where the social differences between them must, perforce, be so much more pronounced.

 

Alex might have said, as once did Shakespeare’s ‘Cesario’ that his state was good; he was a gentleman. Peter, however, had inherited a state – an estate, indeed – from a father who’d invented a type of steam pressed screw now used all over the world, and if his birth was no loftier than Alex’s, his bank balance ascended to infinitely greater heights and that could and did make all the difference.

 

It was still a matter of more than occasional wonder to Alex that, despite all the doors open to Peter, Peter still chose to come back of an evening to lodge with him.  

 

Alex had joked - when Peter had suggested their living together - that they would probably go along quite well as long as Peter didn’t propose picking out the monarch’s initials in bullet-holes on the wall. As it turned out, sharing a space with another adult threw up many other more pedestrian points of conflict than Alex’s beloved Conan Doyle had ever suggested – hair shavings in the bathroom sink being only the first and most common of them – but all the same they’d managed for nearly two years without coming to blows.

 

Alex could imagine that - at least until Peter finally worked out how to notice that nine in ten of the young women he met wanted to marry him, and took one of them up on it - they might continue harmoniously together for some time yet,

 

Just now, however, with the tail end of August of 1908 leaving the whole city dusty and browning at the edges, it was not the easiest time for Alex to find patience, even on a Sunday when he was free from the confines of the bank itself. The usual small oases of the parks and squares were clogged with nannies and perambulators and when he had gone out he’d felt trapped wherever he went.

 

Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes and fantasised about climbing out of the window he’d just opened and on up to their roof, perching himself amongst the chimney pots there and looking out to where somewhere there must be something lush and green.

 

 _“It really is a very pretty garden,”_ he began singing under his breath. _“And Chingford on the Eastward can be seen/ With a ladder and some glasses/ You could see to Hackney Marshes,”_

 

Peter put his book down and joined in to swell the end of the chorus:

 

_“If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in-between!”_

 

Alex gave a short laugh and smiled. “I say, I’m sorry for how I spoke earlier. I’m in a foul mood. It’s just so stifling here.”

 

Peter inclined his head in acknowledgement. “What you need, my lad,” he said, for all the world as if he wasn’t the junior by nearly two years, “is the wide open spaces.”

 

“If this is more about emigrating to Canada,” Alex began, one hand raised in warning.

 

“How about darkest Devon?”

 

“Devon?” Alex blinked at him. “That’s very specific.”

 

“I had a letter today, from Ruth.” Peter got up and went over to the table where earlier he’d flung his suit jacket after declaring the day too hot for it to be worn, and propriety be damned. He took an opened envelope from the breast pocket, and came back across to Alex’s chair.

 

“Ruth? Your friend Ruth?”

 

“Well I don’t know two of ‘em. Good thing too, I don’t think any human constitution would be equal to it. Or perhaps the pair of them would just take over the running of parliament and leave us all the better off.”

 

Alex smiled. “How is she? Didn’t you say she got married?”

 

Ruth had been more Peter’s friend than his, at Oxford, but Alex had found her pleasant company too. She had been studying at Somerville college, a persona non grata as far as their own college was concerned simply for that alien identity, made a hundred or a thousand times the worse for being female, and of course Peter had managed to get into some sort of argument with her in the university library about the meaning of Paleolithic stone circles, at the end of which they’d gone for an iced bun together and apparently become firm friends. Most of Peter’s better friends were in a similar vein of adventurous, mould-breaking types – another thing which left Alex confused as to what Peter was doing spending most of his time with him; a man who could quite happily fill a weekend with following an ancient ditch boundary across the open countryside.

 

Alex had never particularly found he needed company to enjoy himself. Often, in fact, growing up, he’d found being alone by far preferable.

 

Peter’s company, however, he had found to be not incompatible with happiness.

 

“Married, yes,” Peter wasn’t smiling as he answered, and Alex frowned and paid closer attention. “She had gone to Devon after Oxford, if you recall, to continue her studies on the impact of the mine closures on the villages and towns in the Tamar valley. That was how she met David – he had a farm there.”

 

“Had?”

 

“She’s a widow now.” Peter turned the letter over in his hands. He was not, now, meeting Alex’s eye. “She’s got the farm to run practically single-handed, at least…and… Well, you don’t know this but…” Peter looked up, fixing Alex’s gaze now, his own a little defiant. “She’d had a daughter, already, before she was married.”

 

Alex blinked. Of course these things must and did happen, but never, as yet in his life, to anyone he actually knew.

 

“Yes, it had to be a secret when she was studying, of course,” Peter continued, tone wary but determined. “Eve was thirteen or fourteen when Ruth began at Oxford, and old enough to be left at a private boarding school. David took her on as his own, though, at the marriage – well, Ruth would never of dreamed of being with a man who wouldn’t have. Anyway, Eve’s been able to help out on the farm this past year and a half – it’s only a small place, as I understand it, mostly a dairy farm – but now she’s to go to study at a college for the autumn and Ruth writes asking if I could come and help with the heavier ploughing work. I know she wouldn’t ask unless she’d tried absolutely everything else. And, well,” Peter cleared his throat, looking up hopefully, “I was wondering if you’d like to come too?”

 

Alex tried for a moment to digest all this new information.

 

“If you’re not too shocked?”

 

“No! No, no indeed.” Alex ran a hand though his hair and blinked again. “No, it’s just that I can’t help thinking about how, for all that time, Ruth had so much to be concerned with. I mean,” and he gave a short laugh, “I found it hard enough studying with no one to worry about but myself! And I’m sorry,” he added, “that she’s in difficulties. But I don’t know whether I could… Even if I could now get the time off at the office, I don’t know…”

 

“It’s beautiful in South Devon, this time of year,” Peter’s voice was low and coaxing, and with that voice he’d already lured Alex into far too many scrapes he’d never have dreamed of otherwise. “Verdant and lush. The fruit is coming in on the hedges, the flowers are still everywhere, and when that nip of cold comes they burn peat from the moors and the scent is…” he shook his head, eyes closed in remembered delight.

 

Alex swallowed, and tried to keep good hold of his rational faculties.

 

“What do we even know about – what was it? Ploughing?”

 

“I used to help out with the harvest at our home farm on my parents' estate every year when I was a boy!” Peter came over and knelt by Alex’s chair, his hands on the arm, eyes eager. He was so very much like a puppy that it was hard to resist the instinct to reach out and pat and scratch at his head or behind his ears. Peter had had a fondness, at Oxford, for reading books whilst curled at Alex’s feet, and though somewhere over the years they’d lost the habit, Alex could still miss it sometimes.

 

“And all the rest of it, too,” Peter continued, “I’d help with anything on the land when I could get away with it, I’ve told you that. I loved working on the estate, and when they couldn’t catch me and send me in to the tutor, that’s what I did. And there are books now, guides, it’s all quite scientific.”

 

“Yes, well, the last time you got into talking about science you ended up burning all your eyebrows off,” Alex reminded him. But he paused a moment, thinking. He closed his eyes, imagining the countryside around him - clean air, the freedom to work outdoors. His own upbringing had been suburban and middle class, with day trips to Brighton or Southend the height of adventurousness. It had been at Oxford that all his horizons had cracked open. He’d joined the walking club and the archaeological society, and done cross-country running, mostly at a walking pace as he examined each rock and stone he passed – or at least that was how Peter told it.

 

“If we went,” Alex said, “what would we need to take? And how soon by? And how long would we be staying?”

 

“Not more than three and a bit weeks, just the heavy ploughing, like she said, can’t take much more than that on a small holding.” Peter leapt up from the floor with exuberance that made all the pictures on the mantle fall over. “Thank you! I knew you’d be game for it!”

 

He grabbed Alex’s upper arm and gave him a quick, hard shake - a traditional mode of affection between them. “Don’t worry about a thing! You just get your leave of absence from work, I’ll arrange everything else.”

 

\- - -

 

“I’m just remarking that you will probably need a number of pairs of socks that is greater than one - you’re going to catch cold, mark my words,” Alex shifted his suitcase into his other hand and sighed. “And I’m not sure we’ll be so very desperate for a supply of Colman’s mustard powder.”

 

“It would be very sad not to have mustard,” Peter said, seriously, so seriously that Alex couldn’t even work out if he wanted to elbow him in the ribs for cheek or for doltish idiocy. “And if I get a cold I’ll want the mustard to bathe my feet in.”

 

And with this riposte, Peter did manage to get an elbow in, at least as best he could whilst they were both walking along and whilst he carried a suitcase and carpetbag of his own. Despite these hindrances it was successful enough to put Alex off balance to the extent of his having to struggle not to end up in the gutter.

 

“Oi! Watch it!”

 

Peter’s eyes went instantly wide in contrition:

 

“I am sorry, Alex, I didn’t think you were so near the edge. Here, this is a bit of a slog, isn’t it? I’ll hail us a cab.”

 

When they’d set off from their digs, Alex had been ready to decry anyone who needed a cab for what was usually a fifteen-minute walk to Paddington Station from their building. However, he hadn’t reckoned for the luggage, or the continuing heat of the day; he was sweating and dusty, and only too glad to accept the offer, even it meant letting Peter pay.

 

Peter had, Alex would have admitted - the question of socks aside - organised admirably, and they were already in possession of their train tickets from Paddington to Plymouth and the timetable for the boats up the Tamar from there, which might convey them to their ultimate destination. Peter had been excellent in assembling provisions from the Army & Navy Stores – if a little starry-eyed over that establishment’s fancy ‘kits’ promising everything the traveller needed and which were only needed, Alex had pointed out sternly, having been handed the brochure for his judgement, if said traveller was in the most isolated of tropical outposts.

 

It now emerged that, despite Alex’s best efforts, Peter had been moved to make space in his suitcase for a novelty Dewar’s flask that would apparently keep drinks hot throughout a whole day, and in packing it had removed his socks, and promptly forgotten to replace them anywhere else. Peter was currently of the optimistic view that the pair of socks he had on could be sufficient alone if laundered in the evenings and dried overnight.

 

Alex did reflect that he could insist on their going back to the flat and retrieving the socks, but socks could be bought, no doubt, even in Devon – Morwellham, his Baedeker guide said, was England’s most heavily used inland port – and it wasn’t like Peter couldn’t afford replacements.

 

And Alex was fairly longing, now, to be away.

 

Once they had reached the station, found their train and settled into their compartment, Alex reached down from his bag his copy of the latest edition of Henry Stephen’s _The Book of The Farm_ , which the bookseller in Piccadilly had assured him was absolutely the last word in scientific thought in agricultural matters.

 

Peter also had a book now in hand, and Alex saw with a smile that it was one of the Dartmoor romance novels of the celebrated Eden Phillpotts.

 

They both settled quietly to reading, as outside the window Middlesex became Berkshire and Berkshire became Wiltshire, and onwards into the green valleys of Devon and Cornwall.

 

\- - -

 

By the time their train pulled with in a last, weary whistle to Plymouth, Alex and Peter had finished their sandwiches and taken tea and cake in the dining car, where Peter had engaged their waiter on the topic of how best to brew a teapot for some time and offered to send the railway the catalogue of the ingenious firm who made self-pouring pots, one of which he owned, and which was in Alex’s opinion most unrivalled in its ability to get tea on the tablecloth and deliver minor burns to its owner.

 

“I’m just trying to do my part as a member of the public,” Peter protested as they made their way out to the platform and then on out of the station. “It was only you laughing that made him think I was pulling his leg.”

 

“Sorry,” Alex carried on a little way, then set his bags down and consulted the Baedeker in his pocket for a Plymouth map. “You just become rather… enchantingly enthusiastic sometimes.” He laughed again, and looked up expecting Peter to be laughing too, but surprised another expression on his face, and one that made him worry he had caused offence.

 

Peter took the guidebook from him however, after a moment, and said something quite amicably rude about Alex’s idea of the best route to take – they were never going to settle between them which of them could better read a map – and Alex thought no more of it.

 

Route more or less agreed, it was a pleasant walk through the cobbled streets to the quay, where the barges were clustered ready to set off; Peter made enquiries, searching for the next departing vessel.

 

“There be one of the pleasure steamers coming back shortly, sirs,” the bargee of their chosen craft kept pointing out. “What will take more time allowing you to appreciate the landscape.”

 

For the third or fourth time, Peter shook his head, smiling. “Not at all. We’ve got a friend waiting for us in Morwellham and we simply wish to get to them.”

 

“Oh yes sir? Live in Morwellham, does your friend?”

 

“Yes, at one of the farms near the quayside. Mrs Goodman.”

 

“Ah sir,” a grin broke across the man’s face. “You need only have said. No doubt you’ll be eager to see her, no doubt indeed, if I may make so bold as to say so. A fine lady and a proper lady too. I takes her goods to Plymouth for her, often enough. A fine lady indeed. Terrible sad about her loss, if you don’t mind me saying so sir, no offence meant. But I’m glad she has friends coming.” He smiled more broadly still, regarding Peter with his eyes shining.

 

Alex sighed. The local populace matchmaking Peter and Ruth together would not be especially helpful.

 

He found a neat corner between some wooden crates and settled in, hugging his case to his chest, his other bag stowed elsewhere on the boat.

 

Of course, Peter and Ruth might match-make with or without local gossip. The thought had really never occurred to him about all this. Well, at first, of course, when at Oxford Peter had been speaking so often of the young woman he’d recently met, Alex had automatically had his thoughts travel in that direction, but there had been nothing romantic between Peter and Ruth then – at least not that Alex, admittedly far from expert, then or now, could detect. She had seemed, indeed, in that tiny percentage of women who enjoyed Peter’s company simply for itself.

  
And if Peter had romantic designs around this trip, why invite Alex along and encourage his presence?

 

Alex shook himself and resolved that it was an unworthy topic to think about in relation to his friends, and cast his eyes and mind instead upon the mouth of the river, beckoning back from the bustle of the coast and the town to something serene in the distance, as finally the barge got underway and they set off along the water.

 

The water rippled gently around them, the surface like brown glass, the little waves rushing away from the prow of the boat until finally hitting the thick lush grass of the banks, which emerged from mists that might have hidden Roman legions or Saxon or Viking hordes, or Arthurian knights in their finery.

 

Alex cast a glance at Peter, saw his rapt expression as he too watched their scenery pass, and imagined very similar thoughts would be passing through his mind. When in the first throes of their friendship they had discovered a shared love of the Arthurian, and in fact long planned to visit Tintagel together, though Peter – who had been before in childhood holidays – warned that the place in reality was as full of day-trippers and sandwich wrappings as any other spot.

 

“But there is something, all the same,” he had said, wistfully, “if you stand on the brink of the cliff, looking out, and shut out all sounds but gulls and dreams.”

 

“Not right on the brink of the cliff, I should hope,” Alex had said, because to say anything else might be to say too much – Peter’s eyes had gone liquid and longing, and it was strangely moving, to see a need there so much like his own, to find another who trod the same paths of imagination.

 

Now, he reached out and gave Peter’s shoulder a small shove, looking around the view and then back at him, and smiling.

 

Peter smiled back, and nodded, understanding and agreeing.

 

The steady creak of the barge oars was joined by lowing from shaggy red cattle grazing on a riverside pasture, and Alex breathed the air deeply and fell into contemplating it once more.

 

\- - -

 

Ruth was waiting at the quayside, waving with energy and enthusiasm as soon as she spotted them.

 

Disembarking and seeing her closer to, Alex could easily make out how happy she was, but he thought perhaps there was something cutting deeper underneath; something like relief. One could see signs of tiredness in her face and her hands were red and coarsened in a way that would have made any of the female typists at Alex’s bank fairly weep with dismay – he was always catching them putting salves on their knuckles or the grazes caused by the spokes of their machines, and bemoaning these injuries to each other.

 

“Welcome, welcome!” Ruth stepped back and surveyed them again, her hands on her hips. “You don’t look any older, the pair of you! Babes in arms, like you were still wandering round Oxford all misty-eyed to be in long trousers.”

 

Alex didn’t always find it easy to be around women – many of his acquaintance, not least his relations, seemed to move in another world and speak another language – but he had always felt he knew where he was with Ruth. She hadn’t remarked on their appearance to receive some compliment on her own, she had simply said what she was thinking, just as she thought it, as always.

 

He smiled and picked up his cases again. “Well, we’ve been looking forward to getting out here to the fresh air, I can tell you. It’s like a desert in London.”

 

“Well if it’s wet weather you desire, that much I can promise you!” Ruth laughed. “But for now it’s obliged to be pretty for your arrival. Come with me, I’ll show you the way to the cottage. I hope you’re still smiling when you see where you’re staying.”

 

“As long as we can eat your cooking I’m sure we will be,” Peter said, as they all set off together walking up the cobbled street along the riverside.

 

Ruth laughed again. “Well there might be a lardy cake waiting indoors.”

 

Peter had never visited Ruth here, Alex recalled. She had been married rather on the spur on the moment and Peter had been off in Alexandria at the time, on a university vac in that year when Alex, already graduated, had been alone and working in London. Ruth had come east to the city on a couple of occasions since and Peter had taken her to lunch – _he has to fill his days somehow, after all_ , Alex thought and then chided himself for being uncharitable. Would he go to work if he didn’t need to? Almost certainly not, at least most definitely not in a London bank.

 

Peter and Ruth had always corresponded, though, and often traded recipes, some of which Peter attempted in the flat’s kitchen even though their housekeeper was engaged to prepare all their meals. Ruth’s influence in the matter, Alex welcomed, as Peter was clearly set to cook in any case, and she favoured simple, straightforward, wholesome food without the need to set anything on fire or buy strange and exotic ingredients guaranteed to qualify as fumigation. He still wasn’t sure they’d ever quite recovered the kitchen curtains from the fondue incident of 1907, after Peter had got into too-eager conversation with a friend who’d been skiing in Switzerland.

 

It had been one of the times when Alex had felt out of place, when dining that spring at Peter’s club with such acquaintances of Peter’s who travelled regularly to Europe simply to assuage the tedium of their existence. In subsequent months he’d always begged off going.

 

Peter was nothing like those people, though, really, and Alex would have told him, probably more than once, how much he respected him for that, if only he’d been able to come up with some way to frame the words so he felt able to say them.

 

Till that day might arrive, he punched Peter in the arm when he felt most fond, and hoped for the best.

 

\- - -

 

“We’ll get some tea and cake in you,” Ruth said, when Peter and Alex had returned to the kitchen after stowing their bags in what was to be their bedroom – Ruth had apologised for the need to share, but there were, as she pointed out, only two upstairs rooms unless you counted the linen cupboard. It had occurred to Alex that even getting an extra bedstead (one of the ones set up for their use presumably being usually Ruth’s daughter’s) might have been some effort and expense, and he’d joined in reassuring her that they were fine – they’d shared enough tents in their university days with archaeology club, after all. And - as indeed he’d told her - once you got used to Peter’s snores it could almost be hard to sleep without them.

 

The cottage was certainly small, even after a London flat, and rather dark, but it was clean as a new pin, and smelt of laundry soap and the recently baked cake. The kitchen floor boasted a bright rag rug and the mantelpiece was an array of carefully polished treasures, idiosyncratic and, Alex thought, entirely charming, much like Ruth herself.

 

“And then,” Ruth continued, taking her seat at the kitchen table and reaching for the teapot. “I’ll show you round the farm and the pastures, and you can meet the horses and the cows and the pig, and we can talk about all your lovely chores.” She paused, chewing her lower lip for a moment. “I do appreciate you coming to help,” she added, tone more serious.

 

“Say nothing of it, please,” Peter told her, and blinked rather rapidly.

 

“Delighted to be here,” Alex added, sincerely, and reached for the plate with the cake on, all too ready to move away to more comfortable conversational waters.

 

Suitably refreshed, they had their farm tour, by the end of which Alex was struggling not to bounce up on his toes like a child in sheer delight. No doubt the variety of the place reflected the precarious financial possibilities in any one concern, but he loved the idea of ploughing the fields with the horses and also caring for the cows and harvesting hay and having the chickens, geese and a nanny goat in the farmyard for company too, not to mention the pigsty abutting the privy behind the cottage. Ruth also had a patch of market garden up on a south-facing slope on the opposite river bank, in which, she explained, she was hoping to plant out another year’s crop of strawberries if she could only find the time, and with their coming hopefully might.

 

As the three of them came back down from the garden slopes, passing the others at work there, all of whom seemed to have a kind word or greeting for Ruth, she suddenly stopped in her tracks and undid her jacket in order to consult a watch pinned, matron-style, to the front of her blouse.

 

“Gracious, we need to hurry,” Ruth exclaimed and started dashing forward like a schoolgirl, one hand to her hat to hold it on, jacket flying out behind her.

 

“What’s the matter?” Peter called, running after, Alex panting in his footsteps.

 

“I want to meet Eve on the road,” Ruth cried over her shoulder. “She’s bicycling back from the school where she’s teaching in Rumleigh. This’ll be her last weekend at home before her studies start at the residential college.”

 

“We didn’t eat all her lardy cake, did we?” Alex gasped.

 

“As if I wouldn’t bake an extra one with you two coming!” Ruth called back, and they raced on, laughing, down the hill and all along the quayside to the farm. By the time they arrived Alex was breathless, sweating and as exhilarated as he’d felt in months. With Ruth gone ahead inside, he paused with Peter on the threshold and clapped an arm around him in a quick hug that was really very scarcely more than a shove.

 

“Thank you for bringing me along, honestly,” he said, between gasps.

 

Peter smiled back softly, and squeezed his shoulder once, hard, in return.

 

\- - -

 

Eve was a charming young woman. Alex had felt at first awkwardly conscious of her, both of her gender – he felt he never knew what to say to women – and her history, and afraid of saying something inadvertently insensitive or offensive, but she was (if a little more shy as befitted her young age), as relaxed and informally unconventional as her mother.

 

When Peter had, with all his unthinking, innocent goodwill, offered to help Ruth in the darning of Eve’s stockings as they all sat round in the kitchen after their supper, Alex had blushed for him, but Ruth had called him an angel and thrown a pair his way – catching him smack in the breastbone, and Eve remarked simply “You can darn?” with pleased astonishment.

 

Alex, with _The Book of the Farm_ open on his lap, had felt rather idle next to the lot of them.

 

As the clock on the mantle struck nine, Ruth rose from her rocking chair and bid them goodnight, Eve following her example, leaving Alex momentarily astonished at the earliness of the hour.

 

Then he recalled that, without any sort of servant, Ruth must have to rise in time to clean and fire the range and heat her morning water, quite besides all the usual morning domestic tasks.

 

Until that moment it had all still felt to him rather like a fun sort of pretending game, like ‘roughing it’ for a meal or two on a camping trip. And indeed back at his parents’ house, when they’d still been alive, for all they’d never been wealthy they had never been completely without staff.

 

“I’ll wake you both at six with your shaving water,” Ruth told them, stretching her back out without any apparent self-consciousness before going to climb the stairs.

 

“We’d better turn in soon too,” Peter remarked, frowning as he finished off the end of the darn he was sewing, holding the work close to the oil lamp. He lowered his voice, “I don’t like to burn through all her paraffin, and there’s no point sitting in the dark.”

 

It was a quiet thoughtfulness typical of him, Alex thought, and rose, nodding in agreement, to take a last visit outside to the chill spookiness of the privy.

 

“Light out?” Peter asked, when he had returned from his own trip outside, and they were both in their beds, covers pulled up practically to their noses in the shock of the rural cold.

 

Alex turned to look at him, blinking sleepily, and nodded.

 

Peter blew out the candle. “Goodnight, Alex.”

 

“Goodnight,” Alex answered. “And thanks again. And do try and sleep lying on your side so you don’t snore quite so much, eh?”

 

Peter laughed softly in the darkness.

 

\- - -

 

Ploughing, it transpired, was considerably harder to do well than the book made it sound. _‘Establish the furrows in straight lines, each parallel to its neighbours’_ was one thing on paper, quite another when you had a rusty lump of plough and two Brobdingnagian horses to contend with.

 

“Except the horses were Houyhnhmns, of course,” Peter pointed out when Alex made this observation. Peter had always said his favourite book was either _Gulliver’s Travels_ or _Treasure Island_ , and he’d been rather laughed at about it whilst at Oxford. It had been one of the first things that made Alex realise he really liked him, and that between them there was the potential for sincere friendship. The first time he’d invited Peter back to his rooms for tea, in fact, it had been because they were too busy discussing the conflict between Lilliput and Blefescu to break apart to separate kettles.

 

Alex maintained that the finest works of fiction in the English language were those collected in _The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes_ , but then it was nice to have something else to debate about.

 

In the matter of the ploughing, Ruth had offered some assistance to get them started, leading the horses with Peter as Alex followed with the plough, learning – or trying to learn – how to control the animals and the machine at the same time in even the vaguest attempt at a properly regular field. It was an exercise, he quickly saw, fraught with very real danger if the horses bolted and he were to fall and get tangled in the chains with the razor edge of the ploughshare to embrace.

 

However, given that a large part of the point of their presence in Devon was to free Ruth up for other work, and with her having delivered what instruction she could, after lunch on the first day she left them to it.

 

By the time a few days had passed, whilst they were still not achieving the acre turned over a day that Henry Stephens hoped for, the old wheat field was nonetheless steadily becoming ready for muck-spreading, liming and the harrow.

 

“I’m not bothering growing wheat now, it’s not worth it,” Ruth told them in passing, on their fourth noonday when they’d come back to the cottage to join her for a lunch of cheese with bread and dripping. “That field’s potatoes this year and it’ll be oats again elsewhere. The horses can eat oats, and at least I can sell any excess of them I may have for a price worth the haulage.” She sighed heavily. “Grain from America, beef from Argentina, lamb from New Zealand- and what’ll it be when these aeroplanes are everywhere too? Thank goodness for people in London who can’t bear to wait a week extra for their strawberries in summer.”

 

\- - -

 

“Won’t she let you just give her money?” Alex whispered into the confidential darkness of the shared bedroom one evening.

 

“No, she won’t hear of it,” a few feet away, Peter sighed heavily. “I thought of sending Eve something directly at least – dress material or more exercise books.”

 

Alex tensed.

 

“Yes, I know, you don’t have to say it – between a man and unmarried young woman that wouldn’t be proper.” Peter sighed again. “As if anything could be further from my mind. Ruth’s like my sister and Eve – well, the same, I suppose.”

 

Alex frowned. He thought of all Peter’s well-read romance novels. The current volume was something of the Phillpotts oeuvre entitled _The Secret Woman._

 

“Do you think you’ll ever marry, Peter?”

 

He heard the sound of Peter sighing again, and turning over in his bed. “Who’d cook for you then?” Peter said, and gave a short laugh. “Goodnight, Alex.”

 

In the daylight, Alex might have wondered about such an answer, but it sat soft and comfortable in the darkness between them, somehow, and he rolled it around in his mind like a smooth pebble from the streambed until he fell asleep.

 

\- - -

 

Three and a half weeks in Devon, away from London and the bank, had initially felt like it would be an age, but busy as Alex was the time seemed to fly past, and in what felt like very quick progression all the fields with the remains of cereal crops had been turned under, and they were ready to move on to the old potato field and had brought in the hay besides.

 

For that enterprise Alex had found the relevant page in Henry Stephens and set to trying to bale the hay correctly – or rather, to instruct Peter in doing so – only to be interrupted by a neighbouring farmer who had come to talk to Ruth about setting his boar to her pig, and who regarded their efforts on his way out past the field where they worked without any attempt at concealing his contempt.

 

“From a book!” the man sputtered after Alex had explained, eyebrows fairly quivering. “You might as well play the fiddle to your geese as try to learn farming from a book! Now hand us that,” he said, and took the pitchfork from Alex’s grasp, “and I’ll show you proper! From a book,” he repeated, and spat.

 

At length they met his standard and he stepped backed nodding approvingly. “Better, I dare say better,” he told them. “It’s the instinct of the body, the heart and the hand that makes a farmer – with crops, even more so with livestock, even more so with people. Don’t listen to what they go writing in books, let yourself work it out, with help as you can find it.”

 

“And we do appreciate it, sir,” Alex said.

 

“Ebenezer Mudge, at your service, I’m sure,” the farmer allowed, and nodded again, and shook Alex’s hand and then Peter’s.

 

“Well, Mr Mudge,” Peter offered, “we have recourse to some very excellent cider to lighten our labours, and we’d be delighted if you’d join us in a toast to this day’s work.”

 

“Can’t say that I mind if I do,” Mr Mudge agreed, and soon he was sharing his advice on all manner of things, until Alex wished he had a pencil to write it all down, however much that might have been disapproved of.

 

They also managed to arrange, to Alex’s relief, for Mr Mudge and two of his sons to come one day and do the necessary minimum in hedging work, which Alex could see was beyond his or Peter’s scope, and something they scarcely had time for besides. Ruth treated her helpers to sloe gin and jam tarts as well as their lunches, and by the end it had turned into quite a merry evening.

 

Alex and Peter did set to clearing ditches – less skilled and even harder work - whenever they had an odd half-day spare, such as when the shires were taken by Ruth to be shoed. 

 

It had become mid September, and the sun had started to race itself to set earlier each day. They usually came in from the fields around six in the evening in the rich golden-red light of the setting sun, did their farmyard chores and came into the cottage to find Ruth putting their supper on the table.

 

Some evenings, supper inside them, they’d proceed to Morwellham’s public house and enjoy a pint or two of the local ale, wandering home again past the twinkling lights of the valley in the gathering darkness, the glow inside echoing that of the lantern Ruth carried (stating she didn’t trust either of them not to drop it) to guide them to the cottage.

 

Peter probably still snored; by this point Alex couldn’t recall ever noticing it.

 

“I don’t know how men can want to leave this life,” Alex remarked on their penultimate evening, when they’d all forgone the pub in favour of a slow amble down one of the paths round the back of the quayside houses, picking blackberries and rosehips from the hedgerows. It was getting harder to see clearly, a thin grey light all that remained of the day, but it was still warm and Alex’s fingers were stained and sweet with purple juice.

 

“Young men always want new horizons.” Ruth came up beside him and emptied her own basket into his larger one. “The lads here, they’ve lived in one valley all their lives, seen their parents live here all their lives too, and now suddenly they can move to Plymouth or Exeter or even London, and there’s work for them there and posh houses that don’t leak and a job out of the rain and sleet, with no dung to shift. It’s one thing to choose it, another for it never to have seemed like a choice.”

 

“I know it’s different for us, coming in,” Peter agreed. “But this? Out in the air all the time, and working with horses and able to rely on each other? It’s almost heavenly.”

 

Alex smiled at him, amused as so often to hear his own thoughts coming from another person so readily.

 

Ruth gave a snort of laughter. “Soft romantic! Both of you - always were. I remember that summer you wrote to me that you’d dropped Alex in the duck pond, boating to the Isle of Avalon!”

 

“It was an artificial lake, thank you very much,” Alex said with considerable dignity, and then giggled along with her.

 

It wasn’t a memory he minded revisiting. It had been the first summer after he’d met Peter and as usual he’d been invited – instructed – to come and spend the vac with his aunt who was not just his only living relation but the relation on whose good graces he depended to be able to afford his education at all. Technically she administered a trust for him, but he had never been allowed to feel that it was anything but her money, and was always conscious that for her money certain returns were expected of him, largely serving as a secretary, bridge fourth, gooseberry and piano player at her summer gatherings where he was disdained by most of the company.

 

That summer, though, Alex had invited Peter along. And Peter – rich, handsome, Byronic Peter – was apparently allowed much more leeway in his behaviour and if it pleased Peter to have Alex accompany him off on jaunts during the day then of course Alex must do so. Peter was quite heroic in returning to be charming at the dinner table and afterwards in the drawing room of an evening, and their absences were generally excused. 

And so they’d wandered happily around the countryside, prospecting and surveying and digging things up and seeking out the haunts of the animals, and having picnics and reading poetry and adventurous literature lying out on a rug under a tree, side by side. It remained one of the finer summer holidays of Alex’s recollection.

 

At one point, deep in _Le Morte D’Arthur_ , they’d had the notion to sail a boat bearing Alex as the noble, doomed king out on the artificial lake at the bottom of the garden, and Alex had set out only to find the seldom-used vessel full of water less than halfway across. Alex, swathed in the picnic rug in lieu of kingly raiment, had sunk rather rapidly despite being a strong swimmer, and Peter had leapt bodily into the water to come and rescue him and – rug now sodden and intractably bound round him – simply carried him out and up the bank.

 

Alex had been told, sternly, to spend the next day in bed to prevent catching cold – his aunt had brooked no dissension in the matter, and he’d resigned himself to twenty-four hours of trapped tedium.

 

But soon after he’d been settled in and left – not without visible distaste - by one of the valets, there’d been a knock at his door and Peter appearing around it, with a further volume of Malory and half a cherry cake concealed in the box which was usually supposed to house his portable clockwork moustache trimmer.

 

And so they had sat and read in peace once more, the room quiet and cool and softly scented with flowers that Peter had culled from some hedgerow nearby and the back of the garden; primrose, cypress branches and honeysuckle vines, delicate and subtle even in the toothmug in which he’d left them at Alex’s side.

 

Stripping the brambles of their berries in the hedgerow now, Alex looked at the honeysuckle escaping from a nearby cottage garden to creep round one edge of the hedge, and wondered if Peter remembered that summer too.

 

“Hey, gosh, you’ve got a lot more than me,” Peter remarked, walking past with an admittedly rather paltry collection and casting an envious glance into Alex’s basket.

 

“The first trick is not eating them, Peter,” Alex pointed out, and laughed as Peter stuck out a very purple tongue at him.

 

Under any circumstances, he knew, he would be enjoying working on the land more than he did working at the bank, scratching over other people’s money, or lack of it, but being able to spend the day alongside Peter was part of his pleasure too. He had worried a little, before they’d arrived, that they might find it hard, now, to be so much together, but it was as easy as ever it had been at university, if not easier - the rough edges worn off each other with time and familiarity. Their arguments were all like this one over the fruit – teasing, fond, bickering for the fun of it, if at all.

 

When they got back to the cottage at last and tipped their baskets into one huge basin for Ruth to deal with later, Alex reflected on how pleasing it was to see the fruits of his labours – quite literally, in this case – gathered alongside those of friends, and the better for being shared.

 

Then the horses had to be tended once more before the night, and he and Peter went out into the farmyard and to the stables.

 

Alex loved his time with the shires - rubbing them down, stroking their soft noses and fine flanks, whispering gently to them and having them whicker back. For this evening he had saved a piece of sugar in his pocket all day specially after Ruth had offered it around after breakfast, and fed it to Prince now on his open palm with a fond pat.

 

“Yes, old lad,” he said quietly. “I’ll miss you.”

 

He looked up to see Peter watching, something so sad in his expression that Alex felt an overwhelming urge to try and pat him too.

 

“I’ve another piece of sugar if you like, Peter, no need to miss out,” he said lightly, smiling, and was surprised to see Peter turn away with a clearing of his throat and a flush.

 

The stable smelt of sweet hay and fresh straw and the yeasty richness of horse manure and the dander of their coats. Alex stood there a while, confused, listening to the whuffling breathing of the horses as they marked their approval of being fed.

 

It had been such a glorious, sun-soaked day, and with such a sense of harmony, and that was why, later, as they lay in the dark of their bedroom, the candle having just been extinguished, he risked vocalising his feelings in a way he would usually have shied from.

 

“I do so wish,” he said with a sigh, “that we could just stay here.”

 

“So let’s stay,” Peter murmured back from the other bed. “There’s work for us.”

 

“Work but no pay,” Alex reminded him, and sighed again; he was recalling the fact to his own mind as much as to Peter’s. “We’re here in the first place because Ruth can’t pay anyone.” A thought occurred to him and he frowned: “And goodness knows what she’ll do when we’re gone. There’s the harrowing to be done, and the book says it ought to be more than once before the spring. And more roots to get harvested and stored for the overwintering. To say nothing of the lime, since it hasn’t come yet.”

 

“Write to your bank and ask for more leave, then,” Peter urged.

 

“I can’t afford to.” Alex was irritated now - more with the situation than anything else but he let it out in his voice as he answered Peter. “You can’t just take unlimited holiday and expect to remain in a job! I know you never held gainful employment but that’s how it works for the rest of us!”

 

He regretted the words at once, and wished it wasn’t dark, so that he could have softened their impact with a smile. If they were closer together he could have reached out a reassuring, pummeling touch. If it had been a little warmer he might have got out of bed and gone over to do so.

 

But instead there was a prolonged silence.

 

Then, “I could give you money,” Peter said.

 

Alex winced, feeling sick, and cursed himself for a fool.

 

“No!” He turned over onto his side, facing where Peter was even though they couldn’t see each other. “That’s not what I meant! I’ve no right to your money, and I won’t take it.”

 

His aunt had made him feel like a leech for most of his adult life. Peter might never mean to do it, but it would be just the same if Alex let himself become indebted to him, and that would be impossible and awful and horrid, and Alex could bear anything more easily than losing Peter.

 

Peter made a noise of frustration. “I don’t see why not! If we were married my money would be yours to spend and no one would think twice about it!”

 

“Don’t even think a thing like that! How can you speak that way?” Alex half hissed, half shouted the words. He was mortified, hating the idea of being anything like those others who swarmed to Peter simply for his wealth without any concept of how precious he was in every other way.

 

Peter drew a sharp, gasping breath.

 

Alex had no wish to hurt him, but it needed to be clear, he felt, that he would not take Peter’s money any more than Ruth would – and if Ruth was allowed not to, ought he not to be allowed the same independence?

 

Peter cleared his throat. “Do you want me to go and sleep in the kitchen?” he asked tentatively, a query so bizarre that it took Alex a moment to process what he had heard.

 

“No, of course I don’t!” Alex sighed. “But you should sleep, we both should. And just… just pretend that this conversation never happened. We both will.”

 

For the first time since leaving London, though, Alex found his own slumber hard to come by, his heart still anxious and rapid in his chest, as he lay there in darkness that now felt stuffy and oppressive, heavy upon him.

 

\- - -

 

For all his resolutions to cut the incident from his mind, Alex woke the next day to the sobering recollection of the quarrel pushing into his mind like rainwater through hay.

 

He sat up in his bed and turned, blinking, to see what Peter might be making of the morning. Peter, he hoped, might be able to pull them back to lightness with a joke or some of the self-deprecating humour at which he excelled.

 

But Peter’s bed was already empty.

 

Cursing, Alex stumbled through dressing and went out to join him, and discovered that the day had not only dawned grey but also full of drizzling, freezing rain.

 

“Foul weather,” Alex observed when he found Peter in the barn by the root slicer, filling a bucket for the cows.

 

“Yes, too bad,” Peter agreed, not without an attempt at a smile, but he didn’t meet Alex’s eyes. Alex wondered if he was after all still cross, and thought indignantly that he had no right to be.

 

Chores complete they came in for a wash and breakfast, which today was porridge and some slices of a blood sausage from a neighbouring farm with a recent butchering – something that Alex would usually have considered a treat but now struggled with, horribly conscious of Peter, next to him and yet somehow unreachable.

 

“You’ll not plough today,” Ruth said ruefully as she moved between range and table, serving them second helpings, casting a glance out of the window at the now bucketing rain.

 

“The ditch on the top field, I suppose, then,” Alex suggested.

 

“Yes, it awaits us,” Peter agreed, with an all-too-forced cheerfulness – he was clearly trying to conceal his mood, which made it all the worse.

 

“Do your boots first, I should,” said Ruth. “I’ll get you some beeswax and tallow from the pantry. There’s tar in the shed I think, if you’ll look.”

 

Plate finally emptied – he knew he would need the energy – Alex went to get the tar and a small bucket to heat the mixture in, together with a piece of stick to stir with, and came back to the kitchen, setting himself up in Ruth’s chair near the range. She was already melting the beeswax in one saucepan, the tallow in another, and poured them into the bucket for him as he added the tar and set to stirring, the acrid stench of the tar and the sweet tang of the beeswax wafting warm through the air with the remnants of fried sausage.

 

Ruth next brought yesterday’s basin of fruits to the table, starting to process them ready for jam and jelly, picking them over carefully before adding them to her large copper pan.  

 

Alex paused for a moment, staring at the jewel-like richness of the fruits piled high, and thought of the day before, and how easy and lovely it had been then, and how it might have stayed that way if he hadn’t, like an idiot, started trying to talk – something which he had never excelled at.

 

His best friend before Peter had been a boy from his Public school who, once, he had told he thought of as his favourite person in the world. The boy had laughed at him, taken his best pencils and broken them, and started refusing to accept his company.

 

He was made glad, and then anxious, by these thoughts being broken into by the sound of Peter coming in from the yard, cleaning his boots on the scraper outside the door before attempting to remove them.

 

“Drat it,” Ruth said suddenly, and stepped back from the table, hands on her hips. “I thought I had another bag of caster sugar. Oh well, I shall run between the raindrops - this fruit won’t wait and it’s easing a little now. No, don’t get up,” she added, waving down Alex as he rose to offer to go in her stead. “You get that proofing done. I’ll be there and back in no time.”

 

So Alex turned back to the range as she left, and kept his eyes on his mixture, waiting for Peter to come and join him, whole body tense with the expectation of it.

 

But Peter cleared his throat after what might have been minutes or half an hour, and was standing in the doorway still when Alex turned to look again.

 

“I meant to ask Ruth to get more shaving soap, on her next visit to the shops,” Peter was saying, awkwardly. “And if I go along to ask her I ought to stay and help her really, carry her basket. I’ll just run and catch her up.”

 

“You can use my soap, fathead!” Alex yelled, but Peter was already leaving, and Alex missed the chance to make any insistence about doing his boots too – indeed, scarcely thought of it.

 

Alex picked up a brush to start polishing his mixture into the leather, and attacked the boot in his hand with vicious intensity.

 

\- - -

 

Alex was done with his boots well before he thought Peter and Ruth would be back from the shops, and set off to make a start on the top field ditch himself. It was, as Ruth had said, now raining a little less, and although the ground was too waterlogged for ploughing it was no longer difficult simply to be outside.

 

For all that, his progress across the farm, pushing a wheelbarrow containing a mattock and pitchfork in front of him, was a cold, weary trudge. The cows, watching from a wary distance as he crossed their pasture, stared balefully whilst chewing the hay he’d delivered to them only hours earlier.

 

“Ungrateful swine,” Alex muttered, feelingly if inaccurately.

 

After he’d been working at clearing the ditch for a while, he saw Peter coming up to join him and tried to think of something to say that would make things easier between them. Trying, earlier, to be casual and act as if nothing had happened had been horrible. And yet he couldn’t be sure, quite, of what it was that had happened – not enough to offer an apology or understand if it was a subject safe to approach.

 

He could have wished, again, that he was any use at this sort of thing, but it was unlikely to be more effective than the hundred times he’d wished it before.

 

“Get the soap alright?” was in the end his opening sally, and Peter nodded and grunted and said something about the amount of bracken on the ditch edges.

 

The following several hours of hard manual labour in the cold had, at least, its usual vaguely heartening effect – all that seemed to matter after a while was to get warm again, mere emotional concerns secondary and dulled by the glow of exercise. Alex put his last load of old leaves and mud into the wheelbarrow with a weary grunt and set off across the fields for the final time, eager for his lunch and the excuse for sitting down it provided. Peter was soon following at his side in a silence that one could almost pretend was born of exhaustion alone, and just as companionable as it had ever been.

 

They put the tools away and came to the kitchen. Alex’s boots had been impressively watertight, and now, near the warmth of the range, he soon felt almost comfortable again in the main, although his hands stung and ached with the rewarming, and with the cuts from dead thorns across his knuckles.

 

“I’ll make up another pot of salve for you to take with you tomorrow,” Ruth said, noticing him cradling his hands. “And don’t let them too near the heat, you’ll only get chilblains. I’ll knit you some mittens for Christmas and post them up to you. You still need gloves even in London, I’ll be bound.”

 

It was the first reference that had been made in this way to the parting they all knew was coming, and Alex winced and looked across at Peter helplessly. Peter was staring into his plate like gravy and potatoes might hold the secrets of the universe.

 

“What time will you need to get to the boat, then?” Ruth asked.

 

“I think our train leaves Plymouth at five fifteen,” Alex said, clearing his throat and pushing at his food, cutting the vegetables in half just to have something to do with his hands. “So, I suppose…”

 

“I’m not going back, though.” Peter said, interrupting, putting his own cutlery down with a clatter.

 

“What?” Alex stared at him.

 

“Like we talked about,” Peter said to him, not meeting his eye. “You have to go back, but I don’t, not just yet, and… Well, I’ve said to Ruth that I’ll stick here a bit longer, do that harrowing.”

 

‘But we didn’t…” Alex looked from Peter to Ruth and back again. Peter was still looking down, sheepish, incomprehensible, and Ruth chose that moment to get up and bend over the range, her back to him.

 

“Whatever suits you boys best,” Ruth said over her shoulder.

 

Alex tried to be rational; he’d wanted to stay on and help Ruth for longer himself, so for Peter to take the opportunity do so was nothing so remarkable. Peter would help, generous as he always was, and then he’d come back to London too – nothing had been said to the contrary.  

 

On the other hand, really there was no good reason for Peter to come back. He might not stay with Ruth through till Christmas, but he could go to all manner of places that weren’t a cramped flat in London, or anywhere near Alex at all.

 

Alex stared down at his own plate and wondered how to get the remains of his meal down past the cold lump in his stomach.

 

That afternoon they separated, as if by common consent although Alex still had barely spoken to Peter about anything. Peter went to help Ruth hand-plough some fertiliser by way of rotted seaweed into her market garden site, and Alex repaired the pigsty gate, which had long needed it. Duchess was inside her sty, out of the still-spitting rain and regarded him as if she didn’t think much of his choices in life.

 

“Same to you, mate,” Alex told the sow, and gritted his teeth in frustration.

 

\- - -

 

“So you’re staying, then?” he found himself saying, imbecilic, when finally the day rolled around to time for going to bed, and he was conscious that it was the last night he would be spending in the cottage, and he had expected to wish to linger through each moment, not simply wish for it to be over.

 

“It’ll be easier, don’t you think?” Peter said, and his voice was thick, and Alex couldn’t understand it at all.

 

He’d been waiting for this, though, expecting and dreading it, hadn’t he, for all the time they’d known each other?

 

“I’ll miss you, in London,” Alex admitted, at last, pathetic and tentative.

 

There was no sound from Peter. No snoring either, so he probably wasn’t asleep, and it was simply that he had nothing to say.

 

\- - -

 

The next morning Alex spent trying to tell himself he was glad he was not going to have to face icy water and the root slicer and the chaff cutter and the oat kibbler again after this day. And in truth his back would no doubt appreciate the rest.

 

Unlike the day before, Peter was slow to rise, and sluggish, at last stumbling out of bed and dressing blearily, complaining vaguely of a headache when Alex felt compelled to ask him what was wrong.

 

If that was because Peter had struggled to sleep the night before, then Alex couldn’t help feeling a small sense of satisfaction. If Peter was intent on separating them, let it at least not be easy to do.

 

They fed the cattle and mucked out, and whilst Peter tended to the horses Alex went to bring in more hay. Coming back with the wheelbarrow, he saw Peter leaning into the shire Paddy’s side, face buried in his mane, hugging close and perhaps whispering something.

 

It was quite absurd to feel jealous of a horse. With a kick to the bucket before he lifted it, Alex went to fetch more water from the stream.

 

When they got to the ploughing, the horses, perhaps sensing the tension, were skittish and hard to manage, and the neatness and speed of their progress suffered accordingly.

 

As all four of them – Peter, Alex, Paddy and Prince; twelve legs and no sense of direction, it began to feel like - paced up and down the field and back again, over and over, Alex watched Peter, ahead of him with the horses.

 

Peter was so gentle, with them. Peter was not calculating - he never had been.

 

Surely he couldn’t want a break between them?

 

Alex could just announce that he would, after all, stay on in Morwellham. He could say he was refusing to leave until things were clear between them – that seemed like the kind of thing people said, and did, in books.

 

For at least half of Alex’s heart such a course was the only one that felt possible.

 

But he’d not wanted to be beholden before, and he didn’t want it any more now. And he couldn’t help thinking of all the ways such a suggestion – such a belated acquiescence - might lower him in Peter’s eyes. He might seem indecisive, shallow, easily swayed. He might seem to be leeching, indeed, the worse for pretending to stand on his pride at first.

 

And Peter might quite sincerely wish for them to be parted now, at least for a while. And might that not, in fact, do them good? Alex had worried, before, about their becoming fed up with each other over too long together - perhaps that was what in fact had happened? And so perhaps a few weeks or a month separate would let them reunite in London quite happily in the New Year.

 

Alex plodded up and down the tilled earth, and his thoughts marched in pace round and round his brain and he said nothing aloud beyond what was necessary to the task in hand.

 

At lunch, Peter sneezed twice and was caught by Ruth in the act of wiping his nose on his sleeve and given a handkerchief.

 

“You feeling well?” she asked, and pressed her hand to his temple. “You’re quite warm.”

 

“Only with exercise, I’m fine,” Peter protested, but had to reach for the handkerchief again within moments, and looked up from it with streaming eyes.

 

“Stay in this afternoon, there’s things to sharpen and that harness to mend,” Alex felt a cold shiver of concern, pushing aside for a moment all self-consciousness. “I can finish the long field by myself easily.”

 

“If you’d rather,’ Peter said in a small, hopeless voice, and Alex wanted to shake him almost as much as he wanted to go and wrap a rug around him and heat a copper of water for his feet and make him cheese on toast – their strategy adopted the winter before when Peter had had a three day head cold and made much drama of it. The cure had been effected primarily with Worcestershire sauce, in the end, at least as far as Alex had been able to tell.

 

He gave Ruth an anxious glance. She was brisk, however.

 

“Good idea, Alex. I’ll make up a linctus, Peter, in case you get a cough later, but an afternoon’s rest should see you right. Now, Alex,” she continued, turning to him. “Must watch the clock – can’t miss the boat for your train.”

 

“No. No indeed.” Alex looked at the clock on the mantle and then back at Peter, who was now shoveling away his food quite normally, and told himself firmly that he’d been enough of an idiot already that week.

 

Alone in the fields, Alex completed his afternoon’s tasks with an almost paralysing sense of melancholy, and the only way he could find to fight it off was to urge himself out the other side of the feeling and into anger.

 

He quite brusquely told Peter not to come and see him off at the quayside with Ruth – motivated by genuine concern for Peter’s health, but possibly, he thought afterwards, coming off as pure irritation.

 

What was worse was the way Peter took it, meek and mournful as a kicked dog. Peter had always pushed back, that had been a staple of their interaction from their earliest days in company, arguing about Jonathan Swift and how to build campfires and the correct amount of toffee to be placed in the mouth at once. But he was not pushing now; scarcely answering at all.

 

And in all that teasing and their previous unspoken ease, Alex saw now, they’d never found a language between them to say anything of real meaning, and now he had nothing to use for it.

 

“Well, I suppose I’ll see you soon enough, then,” were Alex’s parting words in the end, as he stood poised in the cottage doorway, case in one hand.

 

Peter had been sitting at the kitchen table with the harness and sundry mending equipment, but to address Alex had risen and was standing, politely and stiffly.

 

“I wish you a safe journey,” was Peter’s reply, non-committal.

 

“He’s very partial to something spiced, when he has a head cold,” Alex told Ruth, as they walked away down the cobbled street for the last time, past the apple trees now brown and baring, and then turning at the forge and so on to the quay. “Curried things and piccalilli – I could buy some before I go if you like.”

 

“I make my own, don’t you worry about that,” Ruth smiled, but it didn’t quite meet her eyes. She couldn’t have failed to be aware of the atmosphere that had grown over the last two days, but nonetheless Alex wasn’t surprised that she didn’t ask him questions – she was as unlikely to venture into the realm of the emotions as any man, generally speaking, and she had been Peter’s friend first in any case.

 

“Thank you for all your help,” she told him, just before he embarked. And he turned and gave her the best smile he could manage and shook her hand warmly.

 

“Thank you for the salve and the jam,” he said, and raised his case, in which these bounties were carefully packed in a nest of old newspaper. “I’m looking forward to enjoying both. And to the memories they will bring of being here,” he added, with more feeling, and sighed. “It has been wonderful,” he told her, sincerely – it had, for a very long time, been almost perfection - and turned away to board the waiting barge before he could say anything else, anything stupid.

 

What sort of a man, after all, would ask a woman to tell another man something he was too craven to say to that man himself?

 

His journey south along the Tamar reminded him forcibly of the his arrival in the opposite direction nearly a month before, and all he had gained and the great deal more he seemed, unthinkingly, to have lost in the interim, and he blanched, and tried to keep his eyes on the planks of the deck between his feet.

 

\- - -

 

The turn from September to October had rendered London a little cooler but, Alex soon found, no easier to breathe in, with a commensurate increase in traffic of all kinds including growing hordes of motor cars, all apparently set on competing with the trains and the million chimneys to blacken the air.

 

Alex felt like some kind of machine himself, settling back to his work, as if he’d been taken up and wound tight and set into rote, inescapable motion. For his first three days back he put his head down and scarcely thought of anything but the stacks of papers that had accumulated on his desk in his absence. It was a sick kind of industry, intense and squint-inducing, and for all that it exhausted him in many ways more than the farm work had, it left no glow of achievement in its wake.

 

He looked around his corner of the bank floor, sometimes, at the bent backs of his fellow scribblers and the scurrying office boys urgently bearing one set of sums from person to person as though life depended on it, with nothing for any of them to show for any of it but more paper, and ran his inky fingers through his hair, and sighed.

 

Then it was Sunday, with newly unwelcome free time ready to be filled with reflection. He could not easily avoid reflecting, now, on how he was still waking in what were practically the small hours of the night, weary but ready to greet the horses and cows and see and smell their breath on the frosty air, and sinking back in disappointment to another hour in his bed.

 

He could think about how quiet the flat was, and how although, before, sometimes he’d relished being there on his own for hours or even days, that it was very different when you knew exactly when the solitude would end.

 

He picked up the mess of books piled all anyhow near Peter’s armchair, and began to tidy them away, and then froze, uncertain whether it would be worse to leave them out or remove them from sight.

 

He ought not to fret about any of what he’d left behind in Devon, he told himself. Not about whether Clover, their cow with a limp, had worsened or whether someone had remembered that he’d fixed the root slicer with a piece of twine and it might need re-doing, or whether anyone else had noticed exactly how Prince liked to have the skin between his ears scratched.

 

Nor think about anything or anyone else there either. He’d abandoned that right when he’d left.

 

He tried to read, and all the books seemed to be about how he was feeling. Words leapt out to talk to him that he would never have thought to associate with his situation. A treatise on the stone circles of Somerset became about small houses and the dawn. A newspaper article on unemployment in Manchester was their conversation whilst berrying. A novel entitled _The Voyage of Hope_ , which his aunt had given him for his birthday and he was struggling through in order to thank her properly, he threw across the room after the following exchange:

 

_“Oh no, Frederick,” said Doris, and cast her violet eyes downwards modestly. “You must not speak of such a thing.”_

_Frederick’s noble heart swelled in his breast. His love for her had been nothing until this moment, when her gentle chastity, that most precious and entirely Christian of virtues, forged it in his heart to something great and good. “Oh Doris,” he said, and fell to one knee. “Allow me simply to hope that when I return from South America, you will not have chosen another!”_

_“Oh Frederick!” said Doris. “I cannot talk of marriage with you, it would not be proper at all.” Already, she was thinking how she might speak of the Christian message to him, and perhaps, at last, bring him to the fold._

_“I must have a reason to live!” he implored her. “I dream only of a life with you! Unless I have some word, some promise from you I fear what will happen…”_

 

The force with which he had thrown it, Alex found, had broken away some of the spine from the binding.

 

He couldn’t bear to stay seated another moment, and had to dash outside and pace rapidly along as if something pursued him until his the racing of his heart no longer felt out of place. He found his way to Regent’s Park, and mentally ploughed up all the ornamental rose gardens.

 

There was a strange and not very pleasant relief in Monday coming around, after that.

 

He tried walking home from his office rather than taking the bus on Monday evening. His body had grown accustomed to a great deal of exercise and rather than welcome a rest now seemed actively to crave motion.

 

As he walked he saw – the more easily for his slower progress – all the grime and poverty that surrounded even the heart of the capital. Children in rags, begging for pennies with wide, scared eyes, flinching from irritated blows that Alex would have been ashamed to see landed on the meanest animal. Men in nests of blankets hunched against the walls, often with old army uniforms and without limbs, festering in filth.

 

There was poverty in the countryside, no doubt, and dirt enough to go with it, but at least there the hedgerows and seashores and streams might provide. At least there the neediest were not brushed past by the most wealthy almost cheek by jowl without a second glance.

 

He gave one girl – who carried a baby in her arms and had another small, indeterminate being clutching at her leg – half a crown and another sixpence, which was all he had in his pockets. She stared at him for a moment, and then ran away, her flock in tow, as if afraid he might think better of it. Or, he thought with a shudder, that he might ask for something in return.

 

If Peter had been there, he’d probably have charmed the fear away from her. And Peter would have had more ready money to give, and been only too eager to give it.

 

And would that girl have been lessened, at all, in accepting?

 

Would Alex have respected her more for if she, for all her evident need, had turned down what little he had to give her?

 

He sighed heavily, falling back into the rhythm of walking.

 

He ought to write to Peter. He could write to Peter and to Ruth. He could explain himself, or try to, and apologise for whatever the misunderstanding had been and offer to return for a weekend, at least. This very weekend, even, in only four more days! His pulse quickened at the thought.

 

He wanted – needed – to see Peter again, to make things right between them. If that necessitated a little humiliation, he could bear it. Anything would be better than this, and if…

 

Here in his train of thought he paused, because he hadn’t had this thought before, not in so many words, although he knew at once that it was the absolute truth:

 

If Peter didn’t want a friend that felt the strength of affection that Alex did, then better that they both understood that and got it out of the way.

 

He had faith in Peter, though. Faith he should have relied on the week before. Peter would help him financially, if he could, because it pained him not to, and it was as simple as that, and Alex should have trusted in that rather than carrying on like, well, like the affronted Doris of _The Voyage of Hope_.

 

Shaking his head at himself, not least for the comparison, he carried on towards home, already composing his letter in his head.

 

As he approached his front door, however, he noticed there was a telegraph boy idling nearby, kicking at the railings around the lower area.

 

“Mr Langlands?” the boy asked, scampering into attention at his approach.

 

“That’s me,” Alex told him warily. “Do you have a message for me?”

 

“Yessir,” said the boy, still in a quasi-military form, and scrabbled in a satchel at his waist, producing a thin envelope.

 

Alex tore it open then and there, and read the words like a man in a nightmare, expecting any moment the horror before him may simply dissolve:

 

**RETURN EARLIEST STOP PETER ILL STOP ASKING FOR YOU STOP RUTH**

 

Alex stumbled backwards. He wanted to tear the telegram into shreds.

 

“No, no reply,” Alex told the boy, his hands shaking along with his voice. “Hey, wait a moment though,” he called, summoning him back. “Here’s… Oh blast!” There was nothing in his pocket to tip the boy with.

 

“Can I help you anyway, sir?”

 

“You’re a good lad,” Alex took a deep breath, and tried to make a coherent plan. “Hail me a cab, and I shall be down again in a moment with my bags. I have to get to Paddington Station at once.”

 

\- - -

 

Reaching the station with great speed and efficiency, Alex was forced to recall that none of his own desperate energy could cause the trains to depart more frequently for the West Country, nor speed their progress once they began.

 

For every moment of his journey he felt every sinew in him straining to urge his course faster; he wanted to shout and slap his hands down on the sides of the rail coach as he might with a horse under his control, and it was hard to know that all he could do was sit in his third class seat and watch the scenery passing until he felt ill himself with the motion.

 

He had packed some clothes - he thought probably everything necessary but couldn’t especially care. He had been more concerned in bringing the Worcestershire sauce bottle from the kitchen cupboard, and the leftover throat lozenges and even half a bottle of ‘Mystic Oriental Miracle Tonic’, which Peter had purchased somewhat recklessly in China Town the year before and had seemed to be primarily purgative in effect.

 

But Alex was ready to try anything. He would have done anything, brought anything, sought out anything at all, no matter how hard or how far, if he could have used it as a talisman to reassure himself that Peter would be well again.

 

Somewhere along the train ride he drifted into a light, anxious sleep and dreamt of Tintagel, at least of how he sometimes saw it in his mind, an awesome wreck of stone on a steep peninsula of black shale rock. And he was there, edging his way along the outside of the walls, inches from the perilous drop to the sea below, and it was dark and raining, and Peter was trapped somewhere ahead, calling for him, and he couldn’t see… he couldn’t…

 

He woke in a sweat, startled, to find the porter shaking his arm and informing him that this was Plymouth, and the end of the line.

 

The town was different in the darkness, eerie with creeping sea mist. There were no more barges travelling up the Tamar that night, he was told, when finally he found a man to question at the river mouth.

 

Frantic, he stared up the river, along the vanishing course of dark water. He would have paid anything, at that moment, to charter a boat just for himself, but he had no cash left at all.

 

He should have gone looking for a hotel that would be prepared to take a cheque from a distraught young man passing through for one night; there was nothing he could do to hasten the coming of the morning or the sailing of the first boat.

 

But at that moment he was unable to summon anything like rationality, and he wedged himself into the corner of a seat in a small, thatched shelter on the waterfront, and set in to wait.

 

\- - -

 

The walk – half a run, despite his bag – from the quayside at Morwellham to the cottage door, in the grey light of the still-thickening dawn through which the first barge of the day had pushed so slowly, was agony. Alex’s heart seemed to have moved right into his throat and was pounding and aching and choking him even as he tried to move yet more quickly.

 

And then he was at the cottage door, and pushing past it to get inside, although he probably ought to have been knocking, being no longer a guest. He was terrified of what he might find inside, of how the situation might have changed even over the course of the night, and the empty kitchen for a moment nonplussed him. He dropped his case at his feet and looked around the room.

 

“Hello?” came a voice from the stairs, and Ruth was descending.

 

Alex, panting, could scarcely get any words out. “How… How is…? Is he…?”

 

Ruth pressed her lips together, and gave him a sympathetic rueful smile. “I’ve just been trying to get some gruel into him. He can’t keep much down.”

 

“But is that… Is that better?” Alex walked over to her, his hat, scarf and gloves still on, which he only realised when he went to gesture as he spoke. “Was it the head cold?” he asked urgently, peeling the layers off.

 

“Moved to his chest,” Ruth confirmed. “Which wasn’t so bad, at first. He had a fever but a short, fast one and he was eating and drinking without any difficulty. I thought on Saturday that he’d passed the worst of it. But he woke Sunday in a terrible sweat, and…”

 

A harsh, frantic coughing from up the stairs interrupted her, and she turned to look up with a worried gaze. “And that cough started,” she added. “I’d better go back up. Come on.”

 

Alex bit his lip. “I can’t do anything for you here? Prepare some food? Do the animals need anything?”

 

“Any amount of things,” Ruth told him. “But you didn’t come all the way here to avoid seeing him.”

 

Alex ducked his head, ashamed.

 

“It is hard, to see those we love suffer,” Ruth said, more gently, and came down the last few steps to take his arm. “But there’s something in confronting it. In challenging it, alongside them. And you know in your heart you need to be near him, however hard it is.”

 

Alex nodded mutely and took a deep breath. Then, shoulders set, he followed her up the creaking wooden stairs.

 

The little twin bedroom was hot and damp after the cool autumn day outside. Ruth had stripped the second bedstead - the one which had until so recently been Alex’s - and on the bare mattress was a basin full of steaming water scented with some kind of camphor, filling the air with the heavy fragrance, cool on the tongue as you breathed it in.

 

And there, in the other bed, was Peter.

 

Alex’s throat seized again as he surveyed him. Peter was propped up on pillows and lolled, boneless, against one of them, his face flushed and drawn, his mop of dark curls flat and slicked against his skin with sweat. After a moment he coughed again, his whole body shaking, and Ruth went to wipe the phlegm from his mouth with a handkerchief from her apron pocket; it came away streaked yellow and brown.

 

Alex took two, and then three steps, and was at the bedside.

 

“Hello, Peter,” he said softly. And then, more loudly, “Peter, Peter can you hear me?”

 

“Alex?” Peter tried to open his eyes wider, blinking up at him. “It’s not Alex,” he said, to the room in general, “Alex had to go away.”

 

“I came back, though,” Alex told him, urgently.

 

Peter made a sort of sigh, dismissive.

 

“I’ll go and make some tea, see if he can take some from you,” Ruth said, folding the cloth and setting it on the small table between the beds.

 

Alex grabbed her arm. “I’m so sorry you’ve had to do all this alone,” he said, under his breath. “But thank you.”

 

She shook her head. “It’s not your fault he went ditching half a day in the rain in boots that weren’t proofed and didn’t change his socks for a day afterwards.”

 

“It might be,” Alex looked down. “I could have reminded him, I would have done, if we hadn’t… If I hadn’t…”

 

“You’re here now,” Ruth said, and squeezed his arm again in return. “And if I didn’t think that you could help him now, that he would be heartened just to see you, I wouldn’t have sent that telegram. Now, help him, and help me, and help yourself, and spend an hour or two with him, and I’ll get the poor goat milked.”

 

Alex gave a short laugh despite himself, cleared his throat, wiped the back of his hand quickly over his eyes, and went to sit at Peter’s side, lifting a glass of water he saw waiting there.

 

“Do you think you could take a little water for me?” he asked gently, and reached out to touch the side of Peter’s head, soothing with his fingers along with his words just as he would have done with one of the horses.

 

“Alex?” Peter frowned, eyes seeming to try to focus. “Are you sure you’re here?”

 

“Very sure,” Alex laughed again, then had to bite his lip. “Water, eh? How about it?”

 

Peter frowned, and then made the face that usually meant he couldn’t be bothered arguing any more, even if he was still sure he was right, and obediently leant in to drink.

 

“I should have been here all along,” Alex told him, softly, and gave in to the impulse to stroke his hair again; sweaty as it was, the contact made Alex feel better.

 

\- - -

 

As before on the farm, Alex found himself falling into a routine over the next few days, but this was a fraught, frantic one in which he and Ruth fought to eke enough activity from the ever-decreasing sunlight hours to complete their most vital tasks and still have one of them always free to tend to Peter.

 

It was not Alex’s place, as a man, nor Ruth’s as a woman not Peter’s relation, to nurse as they did, but Alex certainly didn’t care, and he doubted Ruth had exhausted much energy on the subject either.

 

The focus of their day was in the small bedroom where Peter lay. The animals had to be tended, and the house and their clothes kept clean and food produced and consumed, but all that played second fiddle to ensuring Peter had at all times enough blankets, a cold compress for his head and a hot brick at his feet to draw down the fever. Ruth made up a fresh mustard plaster for Peter’s chest every other day, but she gave little credence to patent medicines, and so they were simply administering tea, gruel, and a hot lemon toddy whenever they could, with sips of water in-between.

 

And feeding was the least of the intimate tasks Peter needed help with, but Alex didn’t mind that either.

 

“After all, if I was married to you,” he said, with a laugh, taking the pot away – he’d been brooding on their fateful conversation and the words came easily to mind – “I’d have to do all this and more.”

 

“Alex, ‘m sorry,” Peter mumbled, resting back in the bed with a weary sigh. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow between the coughing fits, another of which he broke into now.

 

“Don’t try and talk, it’s all alright.” Having put the pot aside, Alex came back and held a clean handkerchief to Peter’s mouth, watching with a wince as the brown-yellow mucus appeared again. “Nothing to worry about, nothing to apologise for. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

 

“Never would have dreamed…” Peter said, urgently, and flung his head to the side, breathing becoming more heavy, dissolving into a cough again.

 

“Shhh,” Alex mopped at his brow and patted his cheek. “Never mind.”

 

But, “I should be allowed to marry you, and then it wouldn’t be insulting,” Peter was saying. His eyes were still closed, his face not even turned in Alex’s direction. “You should be allowed to marry who you’re in love with. But not dishonour,” he added, and shook his head. “No. Love and honour, they say. And I don’t honour you if I tried to touch you, but I wouldn’t, do you believe me?”

 

“Do you believe me?” he called out again, after a moment, more frantic, and Alex had to make himself move forward from his frozen position, where he’d been paralysed with what he was hearing, and try and soothe Peter again, if only to keep him from flinging his blankets off or himself out of the bed.

 

“I believe you!” Alex told him, just to say words in comfort, scarcely even thinking of their meaning; he would have told Peter just then that he believed in pixies and sprites and the fairy Tinkerbell, if it would have made him calmer.

 

Peter was still moving frantically, and Alex, trying to quieten him, found himself climbing onto the bed at Peter’s side, his arm and leg flung over to try and keep Peter in place.

 

“It’s alright,” he said, over and over, his voice as calm and assured as he could make it, and perhaps this should not have been easy after such revelations as he had just been privy to, but it came naturally as anything. “It’s alright, it’s all alright - it’s fine. Nothing’s wrong. You’re alright.”

 

And finally Peter steadied, and drifted back into sleep.

 

Later, though, with Ruth taking her turn at Peter’s bedside, and whilst he ate his own supper of vegetable soup and bread in the kitchen, Alex stared into the fiery glow of the range and thought about what had been said.

 

He’d never thought of that. _That_ was something in newspapers. _That_ was incidents like Cleveland Street. Oscar Wilde. The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno.

 

Could Peter really feel for him in that way? He was not sure if the harder portion to believe was that Peter could be like that, or that, if he were, the recipient of his attentions could be Alex.

 

But it seemed indubitable that Peter had imagined some world in which they could marry. And had he thought, when he’d spoken so obliquely of it to Alex in reference to their finances, that he had revealed all?

 

And then he would have heard Alex recoiling, heard the words of rejection that Alex had intended only to be directed at his money, and imagined it to be from him and his wishes for them.

 

Any remotely practical or conventional person – Doris of _The Voyage of Hope_ and all her ilk – would be recoiling now, Alex thought.

 

But the horror he might have expected to feel at being thought of in such a way seemed not important in the slightest, not set against the fact that, above him, at that moment, Peter was still struggling to gain each breath.

 

Nothing else had any reality, just now, next to that.

 

\- - -

 

“Did your bank give you trouble about getting away again? I never thought to ask,” Ruth said, as Alex briefly crossed paths with her on Thursday, she with her bucket of pigswill, him coming in from the horses ready to go to Peter’s side.

 

“I didn’t ask,” he confessed. “I sent a wire from Paddington just to inform them I wasn’t going to be around for a while.”

 

She laughed, perhaps at his impulsiveness, but he thought he saw a certain approval in her eye that he’d not experienced from her in a while, and realised when he received it how much he’d missed.  

 

\- - -

 

On Friday night it was Alex’s turn to sit up in a chair at Peter’s bedside, dozing fitfully. When it was Ruth’s turn would still spend his night in the room, but allowed himself to get into the now made-up bed and lie down, as he never did when he was on watch.

 

He was woken some time in the middle of the night, not so much by a sound as by the absence of it, Peter’s breathing having become slow and shallow, and horribly, wetly laboured.

 

“Peter!” Alex called out in alarm, and put an arm around him, urging him forward, trying to sit him up further. “Peter, come on.”

 

It was just the two of them in that tiny room, and he knew there was nothing he or anyone could do but hold on and be there, for all he would have fought tigers and Gatling guns if it could have been of any use.

 

“Peter,” he said again, and rested his forehead for a moment against Peter’s shoulder, feeling the heat of the skin and the sweat through Peter’s nightshirt. “Peter, please, stay with me. I want you to stay with me. I need you.” He swallowed and spoke again: “Keep going, please, stay with me.”

 

And on and on, more of the same, scraped from inside him, things he would never dreamt of saying before, things that he wished now he had been made to confess years ago. How entirely horrible was the idea of Peter not knowing, and not now being able to hear him.

 

Peter began a coughing fit, weak but still a sign of persistent life that Alex welcomed, and he hugged him tighter, and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, still holding him in his arms. He pressed his lips against the side of Peter’s face, tasting salt sweat, and kissed his cheek gently, and over his ears, and whispered to him like the stories and legends might be true and the words hold a kind of summoning power: “I love you, my darling, please, please don’t leave me all alone.”

 

\- - -

 

The crisis, like the night, eventually passed. Ruth came into the room at six in the morning with hot water for Alex to wash in, and Alex put a finger to his lips and pointed down at Peter, who he still held cradled in his lap as he sat on the bed at Peter’s side.

 

Peter was cooler now, and breathing easily.

 

Treading with the utmost care, Ruth came quietly across the room, and gave Alex’s shoulder a tight squeeze, and then reached to gently dab away the tears that were forming in his tired eyes, so he wouldn’t have to move Peter to do so for himself.

 

Then she retreated, coming back up the stairs after a while with three cups of tea on a tray. She passed one to Alex, and, when he had drained it in a thirsty gulp, the second, and then sat down in the bedside chair to sip at her own cup, smiling at them both.

 

It was not inconceivable, Alex thought, that Peter had spoken to her, consciously or otherwise, of his feelings for Alex. She might know all. But if so, it seemed not to have diminished either of them in her eyes by one iota.

 

\- - -

 

“I’m sorry, Alex, do my feet smell awfully?”

 

Alex looked up from where he was rearranging the covers at the foot of Peter’s bed and grinned.

 

“Awake are we?”

 

“Just about, I think.” Peter tried to sit up a little on his elbows, only to fall back again with a sigh. He coughed again, and Alex went to help him up and hold the handkerchief, but it was a better cough now, clearing his lungs audibly, and his eyes, though ringed with weariness, had cleared of the feverish shine in the course of the day; it was Saturday evening now.

 

“It would seem that you are back in Devon,” Peter said slowly, “and I suppose we must have talked about it when I was ill. I’m afraid I don’t remember. Is it alright for you to be here? With your work, and…” he stopped, swallowing, clearly anxious.

Alex folded the cloth in his hand and tried to sound casual. “If you want me here?”

 

“Alex,” Peter said feelingly, reproach and affection together, and when Alex looked up to meet his eye he wondered how he could have been such a fool as to mistake the emotion he was so used to read in them.

 

Alex cleared his throat, gave a quick grin. “Well. That’s all that matters then.”

 

“But did I… when I was ill, was I delirious?” Peter frowned. “Did I say… anything I shouldn’t have done?”

 

Alex hesitated. He didn’t want to lie, but now was not the time to try and speak of mysteries.

 

“Let’s just say you were your usual inimitable self,” Alex said at last, and offered a reassuring smile. “Now,” he said, and moved back down the bed. “Your feet do smell, I’m afraid to say, and something chronic. Perhaps the next item on the agenda should be re-introducing them to the concept of soap and water, and some of the rest of you too for that matter – any longer without shaving and I’ll have to bring out the sheep shears.”

 

Later, gong to tend to the horses for their evening feed, he felt like he was moving lightly and easily, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders or some poison lanced from his own system.

 

Smiling, he sat down wearily for a moment on a straw bale to watch the horses enjoy their food.

 

The next thing he knew was Ruth gently shaking him awake.

 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, startling up and then stretching, tilting his head to try and work out a crick that had formed in his neck whilst he slept.

 

“Not to worry. But you ought to eat now, too. I made stew and dumplings, and Peter’s had a very commendable amount of the broth. He can sleep by himself for just a little, now, whilst you and I eat at a table like adults.”

 

“I can’t believe…” Alex stopped, and sighed. He felt stupidly close to crying again.

 

“It’s alright,” Ruth told him, and then, when his shoulders started to shake, pulled him into a hug. “You’ve all the time in the world, now.”

 

\- - -

 

“Clover’s limp has improved too, which is a relief,” Alex was saying, sitting at Peter’s bedside, darning a pair of his socks as he shared the news of the day on the farm. “So she can be set to calve too, for the spring, and then the milk yields should hopefully be enough after all.”

 

“Listen to you. Regular old dairyman,” Peter said, and smiled. He sighed and stretched out in the bed. “Oh I miss them – all the animals. They’ll all have forgotten me, what’s more. Take ages to get the cattle to let me near them again.”

 

“Nonsense,” Alex protested. “No one… I mean, they wouldn’t, I mean…” He set his mending down and went to pour more water from the jug on the small table between the beds. “Here, you need to keep drinking.”

 

Peter took the glass, and stared into it, contemplative.

 

“I never asked you properly,” he said slowly, “what happened with your job, and having to come here after me. I mean – not that you had to. You didn’t have to. I would hate to think that I…”

 

“I hadn’t been in London two days before I was thinking of ways to get back here,” Alex said quickly. “And all I care about in relation to it now is that I left Henry Stephens behind in our parlour.”

 

“It is still our parlour, then?”

 

Alex stared at him. “Of course it is. Of course I… Peter, our argument, I…” He ducked his head, took a steadying breath.

 

“I think,” he said, and reached out his hand to rest on the edge of Peter’s mattress. “I think we mistook each other, when we spoke before. If I seemed… You do understand that I would never seek your company for your money? Or, to put it another way, that if you had nothing, I would want to be your friend just as much?”

 

“But…” Peter blinked at him. “Do you mean to say… _That_ is why you told me not to speak of it?”

 

“That’s why,” Alex said, and watched Peter’s cautious, hopeful smile with keen delight.

 

He could have left the topic there, have got up and moved away, fetched more tea or occupied himself in choosing a book from their small shelf from which to read aloud next.

 

But he shifted his hand along the mattress, until the side of his little finger brushed lightly against the side of Peter’s where Peter’s hand rested.

 

He didn’t say anything else, and Peter didn’t speak, and if Peter looked at him Alex didn’t see it because it was much as he could do to maintain the contact and see their hands together before him. Like that they waited, in a silence that felt comfortable as a hushed grove discovered in a woodland, until there came the sound of Ruth calling out for Alex to come and collect Peter’s lunch on the tray.

 

\- - -

 

Over the next several days Alex now found himself in a peculiar position. He and Peter were on good terms again, as much friends as ever, and a large part of him – the tentative part, the part that surveyed all the possible routes on a map before setting out, or read the relevant chapter in its entirety in the manual before commencing a task – thought it must be best, now, to leave well enough alone.

 

Peter didn’t know what he’d confessed to, after all, or that Alex had understood it.

 

And at times Alex still had difficulty believing he had really understood anything.

 

And besides those feelings were Peter’s, not his own – nothing he had ever wanted.

 

Except, now, when the thought came to him – as, inescapably, sometimes now it did, when he was with Peter or more often when he was away from him, out working and missing his company – he felt a small, curious warmth, fascinating and wonderful.

 

The idea of touching Peter more than he had. Or of seeking touches given before and enjoyed - asking for them rather than waiting and hoping; this idea drew him in with perhaps the same sort of instinct that made all the other creatures of the world follow the pattern of their lives with a steady unthinking confidence.

 

Here too, though, the more circumspect part of him was not without fodder for anxiety.

 

There were no books, at least not that he knew of or had ever seen, addressing such an undertaking. Perhaps a veiled hint in Wilde – those comedies had not been to his taste before and he would not dare order them now. There was Fanny Hill, which had been passed around in secret at his school, but at the time he’d had little interest and in what he recalled of it there had been little talking and the various characters setting to their tasks without hesitation or much instructive detail beyond the obvious.

 

He had learnt in the course of his studies, naturally, of the theories of Plato and the places in classical history in which historians touched upon the various vices of the ancients, but those were theoretical or, again, very non-specific.

 

There were parts of London where, he suspected, pamphlets or etchings or _something_ on the topic could be obtained – and one heard stories about guardsmen and sailors, although the very the idea of a stranger quelled him.

 

The idea, perhaps, of Peter with a stranger – had he resorted to that? The way the newspapers told it, men inclined to the vice were entirely wanton in it. And what was extraordinary in that, after all? Many men kept mistresses or visited brothels before and indeed after marriage, it was not uncommon in any persuasion. If Alex were a female contemplating engagement, he would have to accept the wild oats of his future partner as part of life.

 

For all this logic, though, he could not like the idea, and it made him quite subdued for a day or two. And not just the idea itself, but the realisation with it that there might be part of Peter that he didn’t know, secrets long hidden.

 

And that among the past spectres there might be – he couldn’t help but think – those against whom, in all his uncertainty and ignorance, he could scarcely compete. Might Peter come to regret his choice, as men fell out of their infatuations and regretted their marriages?

 

All in all, Alex was feeling a deal more sympathy for women than ever he had in the past. There was a fraught quality to this existence he supposed he now shared with them; the state of being unsure of a man, and entirely uncertain how to approach him.

 

Meanwhile, outside, the world turned and the days shortened and the temperature fell. The leaves left the trees and coated the paths in a mulch of brown and the first frosts began to lie on the fields in the morning and to be coating every surface as Alex and Ruth tried to work, burning their hands with cold.

 

‘We’ve had the quicklime delivered, at least,” Alex told Peter one evening, having retired to their bedroom after his supper with Ruth. “I’m going to visit next door and see if Mr Mudge can advise me how best to spread it – if the larger pieces should be broken up or something.”

 

Peter laughed. He was looking so much better now, and allowed downstairs for part of the day, if well-wrapped. He was eating well and no longer quite so pale, for all he got little sun. He spent his time either reading or knitting himself new socks, which skill Ruth had demonstrated to him and which had a certain aptness, Alex felt.

 

Alex picked up his own whittling for another while – it was getting too cold for his fingers to work much longer, but he needed a new peg for the plough chassis. As he worked he started to whistle.

 

 _“…I shall achieve in time/ to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime,”_ Peter chimed in with the words of the melody, and laughed again, then held up his knitting in acknowledgement. “Do you say so, sir?”

 

“I do say so, sir,” Alex told him.

 

Peter rolled his eyes. “Well, all I can say to that is: you know not what you have started.” And, after a deep breath, he launched into a tolerably tuneful rendition of the operetta’s very first lines.

 

_“If you want to know who we are/ We are gentlemen of Japan…”_

 

At one point they had both known the entire libretto of _The Mikado_ through. Alex took up in chorus and found it came back to him perhaps alarmingly easily. They had barely reached the entrance of the Lord High Executioner, however, before he had to stop singing to yawn widely. His fingers really were frozen to the point of uselessness now as well.

 

“Bedtime, I think,” Alex said, not without regret – it had felt for a moment like old times, the simple times. He set his work down, and busied himself with the trip downstairs and then stripping off his top layers to get into his nightshirt, followed by cleaning his teeth. He pulled on a pair of bed socks he kept under his pillow and wrapped a scarf round his neck.

 

Even so, it was with a wince that he slid under the covers.

 

“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed, and tried to curl into a ball, the better to conserve warmth.

 

“You sat out too long up here,” Peter murmured, sounding concerned. “Go and get a brick from the range.”

 

Alex didn’t fancy even one more short dash downstairs. He was tired and his eyes drifting shut for all he shivered.

 

“Look, do you want a brick, Peter? I could get you one.”

 

“I’ve been in here ages, I’ve got my own warmth round me now.”

 

Alex bit his lip.

 

Things were no longer simple. But then, in all their complexity, new possibilities arose.

 

“Then might I…” he looked over a Peter. They’d yet to extinguish the candle but reading his expression at that moment seemed fearfully difficult all the same. “Might I get in with you? For warmth?”

 

Peter blinked at him for a moment, but then nodded.

 

Feeling awfully bold, Alex took the step and a half across the narrow gap between the beds, and slid himself sideways under Peter’s covers, trying to let as little heat escape as possible with the endeavour.

 

“Budge up then,” Alex said, as he tried to get fully onto the mattress, as lightly as he could.

 

“Alright, give me a moment,” Peter complained, his voice slightly odd. “Oh you swine, your feet are cold!” he added, more naturally.

 

“I’ve got my woolly socks on!”

 

“They’re still leeching heat out of here like… like a leech!”

 

“Leeching like a leech, Peter, really?” Alex shook with laughter. All of a sudden everything seemed easy again.

 

Having gained enough possession of space not to fall out again, Alex tried to tuck the covers around his side and then sighed happily, relaxing as the delicious warmth of the bed moved through him. “This is so much better. Thank you.”

 

“Any time,” Peter said vaguely.

 

Alex felt a wave of simple tenderness, and, once he’d blown out the candle, turned over to lie belly-down. “May I?” he asked, and lifted his arm.

 

“Would help the fit,” Peter agreed, and Alex brought down his arm across Peter’s chest, hugging him close as they lay side by side.

 

“I did this when you were ill, more or less,’ Alex confessed. “Had to, sometimes, when you seemed like you’d shake clear out of the bed and onto the floor.”

 

“I see.”

 

“But you’re well now,” Alex continued, and – it was so much easier in the dark – lifted his head to brush a very quick kiss against the side of Peter’s face. “That’s the most important thing.”

 

“Is it?”

 

“Go to sleep,” Alex said. “I am.”

 

And, true to his word, he stretched out and closed his eyes. Under his hand and arm, he felt the rapid beat of Peter’s pulse gradually calm and grow steady.

 

Perhaps despite everything, he could work this out.

 

\- - -

 

Peter soon began spending more of his day out of bed, but when the night came he and Alex returned to it together always now. It was not perhaps the easiest or most practical arrangement – there was not exactly much room for two – but nonetheless in this way passed some of the most pleasant nights of Alex’s existence.

 

He was not insensible to the proximity of Peter’s body, nor, he thought – although he’d never been exactly able to test the theory – was Peter unmoved by him.

 

He did not feel himself ready, though, to scout further into that new country.

 

And to his relief, Peter made no advances either.

 

They lay together, warm in each other’s arms, and both in their nightshirts and long underwear, and that was that, and if the warmth edged to unwanted intensities of heat at times there was always the cold air all around them to temper it.

 

And it was certainly getting colder, hastening towards true winter, October drawing to its close.

 

“I was thinking of cooking something special for Hallowe’en evening,” Ruth said over breakfast when Peter had been joining them for it for about a week, prior to very light farm work and such tasks as Ruth could find for him around the house. He’d made a replacement for her old rag rug and polished all the silver and the copper pans and sometimes taken over cooking supper.

 

“Special like what?” Peter asked eagerly now, making Alex smile. Peter’s appetite had definitely returned to what might politely be called ‘healthy’.

 

“One of the older chickens, I thought? In a stew with dumplings? Pudding to follow? We could invite a few neighbours – you ought to meet more of them besides Mr Mudge.”

 

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Alex agreed.

 

“They will ask you how long you’re staying on here,” Ruth pointed out and looked from one of them to the other. “And it’s a good question. I asked for help for September, and now November comes upon us. Peter’s well enough to travel now, and I know you boys have your own flat, your own lives to lead. I don’t expect you to stay here, but I do need to know what your plans are, because these will be the people I need to ask if I’m to have other help in. And it is there – I don’t have to rely on you. No, don’t answer now,” she held up her hand as Peter began to speak. “Think about it. Talk about it, between you, just tell me before that Hallowe’en supper.”

 

That afternoon, as Alex harrowed the bottom field where he’d earlier spread the lime under Mr Mudge’s direction, he saw a figure coming up the path towards him and realised that it was Peter.

 

He had at least, Alex saw, remembered to put on a hat and scarf, but Alex still felt a twinge of uneasiness to see him outside.

 

Out here, of course, they could talk frankly.

 

Perhaps that was partly where the unease came from.

 

“Is something wrong?” he asked when Peter drew nearer.

 

“Ruth’s gone shopping. I thought we ought to talk about our plans, like she said.” Peter licked his lips and looked about him nervously before speaking again.

 

“I ought to have spoken before, but I… Well, here it is now, the thing is…” Peter cleared his throat, eyes going everywhere, settling on Alex’s for a moment before darting away. “You can’t have missed how I… What I want when you lie with me. And if you’ve just been… If it’s just because I was ill that you let me…” He took a deep, shaking breath and coughed a little, probably from no worse than a gulp of frosty air, but it made Alex reach out at once to stroke his back and Peter stared at his arm like a revelation and then looked up at him, studying.

 

“You need to understand; I am a moral degenerate of the Oscar Wilde sort,” Peter said, with a tremble in his voice.

 

“You could say it that way, I suppose,” Alex told him softly. “Of you could say that if in some world you could ask me to marry you before God and the world, you would. And I could say,” he added, slowly, carefully, “that I would accept you.”

 

“Alex?” Peter whispered, and the light over his face was beautiful.

 

They were side by side in a field that smelt of caustic lime and guano, with two shire horses watching them, in the freezing cold, and it felt entirely poetic as the deepest excesses of Malory all the same.

 

Their only audience was the shires, and perhaps a robin. Alex looked around them quickly, just to be sure.

 

Then he leant in, and brought his mouth against Peter’s, and then had to break off and gasp a little before they did it again.

 

\- - -

 

That evening, over supper, Peter cleared his throat and announced, with a glow in his eyes that made Alex long to reach out for him, that they were hoping to stay on and help Ruth for as long as she needed them.

 

“I highly doubt I’ve got a job at Stebbings & Stebbings any more,” Alex added, grinning, “and that’s quite fine by me. I did wonder, though,” he cleared his throat and shot a glance at Peter, who nodded encouragingly.

 

“I did wonder,” he continued, “about trying to set up my own small concern here, alongside yours, if that’s something we could work out between us? I sent away for a book about making a profit from a small flock of poultry – I thought perhaps you’d let me have some eggs to start out with, and I would pay you back in profits, hopefully, ultimately, later on. We could arrange something about rent for you, since it would all be on your land, but I do like the idea of something all my own, to try and succeed or fail in.”

 

“Well that sounds splendid to me!” Ruth reached out her hand. “A pleasure to go into business with you. I’m sure you’ll be the one writing the book on the subject before three months are out.”

 

Alex took her hand, shook it, and ducked his head, too pleased to speak.

 

“We, um, also…” it was Peter’s turn to hesitate. He fiddled with the edge of the tablecloth for a moment, and then looked up directly at Ruth. “We worked it out, Alex and me,” he said, firmly. “So there’s that.”

 

From the way Ruth raised one eyebrow and nodded in a rather amused way, Alex rather thought that this was not entirely a surprise to her. A surprise to him, that she had known such specifics perhaps – but then, she and Peter had clearly felt able to trust each other with a great deal, and that was in the end a heartening thought.

 

“Well you’ll have to keep those two separate bedsteads,” were Ruth’s first words in reply, spoken briskly as she rose to collect their plates, scraping the leftovers scraps away into the pig bucket for all the world as if she discussed the greatest crime of the calendar every day of the week. “But if you’d like to push them together, I could sew some of your sheets together so they’re double-sized, just try not to put your knees through the seams, alright?”

 

Alex choked on his tea and had to be repeatedly thumped on the back by Peter, until eventually he got his breath back and it became more of a soothing motion.

 

“I do believe in frankness,” Ruth told him, with a smile, and handed him his teacup back, refilled and exuding steam. “And I for one hope to goodness the two of you are going to get better at it in future. Now, who’d like some of my delicious sago pudding?”

 

\- - -

 

Halfway through his third tankard of cider at the Hallowe’en supper, which had become quite the merry party, Alex found he was leaning slightly into Peter’s side as they both squashed up at one end of the kitchen, watching the children of some of Ruth’s local friends playing at catching apples on a string with their teeth, which, at least after the cider, seemed as fine an entertainment as anything he’d ever seen on stage.

 

Self-consciously he pulled a little away from Peter, but he couldn’t see any of the others present looking askance at them; they were all too busy laughing at the children in any case.

 

Eventually, with the apples captured and the children further rewarded with toffee, Mr Mudge slapped the table and turned to Alex with determination in his eyes.

 

“Now! New entertainment! I know you can sing, my lad, I’ve heard you in the fields often enough. Will you oblige us now?” He reached into a leather satchel he’d kept strung around the back of his chair. “I brought my penny whistle with me. Now, what’ll it be?”

 

Alex was by no means an eager performer, and most of the popular songs he knew had been drummed into him through constant repetition at his aunt’s piano, where he had accompanied many young ladies similarly informed that they must display their skills.

 

Now, though, in the warmth of the kitchen fairly bursting with people and food and merriment, and with the way smoothed by the cider, he rose to do his piece without that much trepidation.

 

He chose a song that was amongst his aunt’s favourites, although there was no helping that. It was an old tune, and one he’d always thought needlessly sentimental, but he was sure everyone else would know the words and pitch in rather than leave him to sing alone.

 

 _“Mid pleasures and palaces,”_ he began, finding his rhythm with the penny whistle. _“Though we may roam/ Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”_

At the other end of the room, Peter was watching him. Alex met his gaze, and felt something in his chest loosen.

 

_“A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there/ Which seek through the world is ne’er found elsewhere.”_

 

Who knew quite how long they’d stay in Devon – for long enough to start a decent poultry concern, for long enough to sow the seed in the earth they’d tilled and reap the harvest from it. Past that, any number of things might happen. There was a whole world that he could be exploring.

 

He would be at home always, though, with Peter, he thought, and blinked rapidly, breaking off a line for a derisory laugh at himself for being moved by as old a chestnut as this tune.

 

_“There’s no place like home/ There’s no place like home!”_

 

In her rocking chair, Ruth nodded at him and kept on knitting his new pair of winter gloves.

 

\- - -

 

There was nothing marking out the day when it happened. Just another round from the late dawn to the early dusk as November drew on around them, and then to bed, to warmth and each other.

 

And that night, for some reason, for no reason, Alex wanted to reach out and touch, and did so, very cautiously, and found Peter gasping, whispering encouragement to him, his mouth to Alex’s ear in the enclosing dark.

 

And Alex kept going, through all the things he’d thought of or dreamed of or wondered might be possible.

 

And with every movement, Peter reached back to him in answer.

 

It was entirely new and entirely wonderful, and it was as easy and necessary as breathing.

 

\- - -

 

**Author's Note:**

> The flowers Peter gives Alex after the duckpond incident represent (if only Alex had also studied the language of flowers) eternal love, everlasting friendship and devoted affection


End file.
